Death and rebirth is the name of the game. Rising, only to fall, only to rise again; life and death, victory and defeat, expansion contraction – the lungs of the totality.

I stand on a mountain of dead selves. I wonder if I would be recognizable to my youth(s); that 12 year old evangelical fundamentalist, the softboy agnostic 20 something terrified of giving offense, the martyr trying to hold his marriage together thinking someday, someday maybe soon things could or would finally click.

Perhaps I’m being hyperbolic, but it really does feel like I’ve already lived (sans any kind of reincarnation or past life framework) a hundred lifetimes already.

And I believe I may live a hundred more before I’m done.

Dialing back the metaphor a tad, perhaps these personal ‘deaths’ are more akin to a hermit crab vacating an old shell to inhabit one that fits better. There is a through line, a being I can gesture towards even as it grows. Yet much of it’s capabilities, much of the way it moves through the world is determined by the temporary carapace it is borrowing– an interface in conversation with the environment and the other shell growing creatures… bodies & blood now dead and dust, only the persistence of grooved calcite remaining to give shape to some other creature.

The shell, now, fits me well. I still have space to grow within it, I’m still figuring out where I can/can’t move to in this season. But I feel safe, I feel in right relation with it all. Time to grow, forage, fight, retreat, and create all anew.

Same as it ever was.

Same as it will ever be.